The technology associated with set-top boxes is ever becoming more advanced, transforming set-top boxes from simple broadcast receivers for accessing cable television programming to specialized computers that are Internet Protocol (IP) enabled and interactive. Today's set-top boxes allow subscribers to access content such as video, audio, Internet web pages, interactive games, and more.
Unlike traditional cable distribution, a large part of modern set-top box communications, such as video-on-demand, telephony, and high-speed-data, are delivered as IP services across the same path. This architecture facilitates the possibility of undesired interactions between the different products, and congestion created from a high demand on one product may adversely affect the performance or reliability of another product. For example, the new release of a popular movie may create a high demand from subscribers to download and view the movie through the subscribers' set-top box. Such a high demand on the network may result in decreased quality of transmission of the movie from a central server to the individual subscribers' set-top boxes and may even affect the quality of other products distributed to other subscribers, such as subscribers attempting to access high-speed-data through their set-top boxes.
The capabilities and capacities of the network are generally discoverable after the fact—after problems have been detected by subscribers and reported to the content provider. Addressing the problems and repairing the network thus become reactive exercises with costs that include frustrated and dissatisfied subscribers, rather than proactive improvements that allow a content provider to maintain a competitive edge and anticipate the needs of its subscribers.
Content providers also typically continue to make new products and services available to subscribers. New products and services are generally implemented using new software and hardware, which may involve new technology that requires intense functional and repetitive testing. Again, waiting for subscribers to report problems is an impractical and inefficient way to test and streamline new offerings. For example, before a new local distribution site is connected to a network for distributing content to subscribers, the equipment and configurations at the new site must be tested, preferably on a scale that is reflective of the actual load and stress that the site will experience when it is on-line. Simply relying on subscribers to streamline the integration of the new site into the network is undesirable.
Currently, the testing of new sites as well as the on-going monitoring and maintenance of existing distribution sites is performed manually by trained technicians. Technicians at a particular site may, for example, view portions of a broadcast at various times during the day, sampling different stations for short periods of time and evaluating the quality of the transmission based on visual and auditory inspection. Such an analysis that relies largely on the human perception of anomalies through periodic sampling makes it difficult to identify all of the problems that may result during the distribution of content to a large subscriber base. For example, human beings are not capable of watching programming distributed to a set-top box on a continuous basis. One person simply cannot watch all channels being broadcast simultaneously and continuously twenty-four hours a day, despite the most heroic efforts. Thus, there may be intermittent degradations in the quality of the transmission on one channel that are not observed because the technician was either inspecting a different channel or not performing an inspection at all.
Even while the technician is viewing the programming on a particular channel, human physiology makes it impossible to continuously view anything, including a video transmission. The average person blinks more than 20 times a minute, with each blink lasting a quarter of a second; thus, some sporadic degradations in the transmission may go unnoticed. Also, human beings may not be able to discern all types of degradation. For example, a person may not be able to detect a “just noticeable” degradation, or may blame a momentary degradation on dry eyes or the like. As a result, numerous degradations may go unreported for long stretches of time.
Thus, there is a need for a system to test the capacity and reliability of a network that provides content to set-top box subscribers in a way that simulates the load and stress applied on the network by an actual subscriber base and allows repetitive functional testing of the network. In addition, there is a need for a system to monitor and analyze the quality of live transmissions over multiple channels simultaneously in a way that identifies infrequent and transient transmission degradations and allows a technician to perform further forensic analysis of problems.